Los Angeles — Exactly one year after releasing the beta of one of the Web’s hottest realtime search engines, OneRiot has officially exits out of beta today, and while doing so has also launched a richer alternative to Twitter’s trending topics with a new engine that analyzes hot keywords suddenly emerging among thousands of status updates from social networks.
In addition, Realtime Web Trending Topics Engine is OneRiot’s current undertaking to deliver current stories and displaying trends before any of the competition. Founded on OneRiot PulseRank technology and realtime index of the social Web, the Trending Topics Engine employs a complex system of social site analysis (of Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Digg, and a OneRiot panel), natural language processing, weighting, filtering, and, most importantly, clustering.
Tobias Peggs announced the roll-out and shared some of his discoveries into real-time search and how OneRiot’s Trending Topics Engine works.
“Everyone is acquainted with trending topics on services like Twitter and Yahoo. One of the primary modes of activity on the realtime web is ‘content discovery’ and clicking on trending topics drives a lot of that activity. Specifically on realtime search, this is one of the primary uses – an amazing 80% of the search queries we see at OneRiot are users looking to track today’s trending topics, to find out what is going on right now,” said Peggs, president of OneRiot.
The old and new look of OneRiot side by side (click to enlarge). (Credit: Screenshot by Josh Lowensohn / CNET)
“Our trending topics engine discovers breaking stories and emerging trends faster than anyone else,” OneRiot’s Courtney Walsh, said in a statement. “And the topics are more detailed: we would not just tell that iPhone is trending right now, we will tell you why.”
“This renewal comes exactly one year after launching OneRiot beta in May 2009 — the first consumer-facing realtime web search engine,” says Walsh. “You can think of our new look as our birthday suit.”
The company claims that it takes a more holistic view because it examines streams of real-time data from Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Digg and a special browser toolbar it has offered for the past year. It employs national language processing techniques to extract phrases, speech snippets and text-blocks that become “Trending Topic” candidates. The engine will compute weights for each of these terms by comparing factors like how fast each one is spreading across a network, cutting out the ones that look like spam.
The result is what the company claims is faster way to see what is up and coming in social chatter, and one that will be more elaborated than before. You can, for instance, now see several related links underneath each main topic, whereas on the old site you would only just see the one. More than anything though, the site has put a larger emphasis on timeliness, adding a large clock in the top left-hand corner next to a constantly-changing ticker tape of trending topics.
OneRiot is banking its final success on distribution as it rolled out an real-time advertising network, delivering content ads against search results. The more indispensable it can be to its partners, the more impressions it will have. The Boulder, Colorado-based company has raised $27 million in funding.